Becoming Biomass

Becoming Biomass is a speculative design research project that envisions a future cooperative- managed agroforestry and biomanufacturing transformation in the Tennessee Valley region as part of the U.S. decarbonization effort. The project deploys methods of narrative and scenario- based world building to depict a multi-scalar and multi-system regenerative future for the region and its human and nonhuman constituents. It is situated in the context of justice-oriented decarbonization that involves dismantling carbon-based material economies and exploitative socio-economic structures through new organizations, collaborations, infrastructures, landscapes, and architectures.

The mappings, drawings, and models depict the roles of primary actors that are intertwined in the biomaterial transformation: Lignin, TRBI, Lands, Agroforestry, Infrastructures, and Biorefinery. Two videos communicate the project in narrative format: Biomass Pasts, Lignin Futures outlines two episodes of regional anthropogenic biomaterial transformation. Part one uses visual archival material to situate the Tennessee Valley Authority’s 1933 forestry program as a way that the region used forestry to transition to less destructive land use practices, circular economies, and collaborative workforce training. Part two describes the future history following the Sixth Deadly American Heat Wave of 2029 as the region transitions to cooperative-managed regenerative agroforestry and biomanufacturing. Becoming Biomass Scroll Drawings animates the future scenario scroll drawings that produce a transect through a territory in transition, simultaneously depicting landscapes, infrastructural systems, architectures, and the everyday life that attends change in time. These visualize the more-than-technical, more-than-human, and more-than- visible aspects of a design proposition that speculatively reimagines the region and its systems.

Lignin: One of the most significant actors in the biomaterial transition is lignin, a biopolymer found in all vascular plants. It has been called “The New Petroleum” by scientists who have found ways to process it so that it could replace carbon compounds for a wide range of plastic products, adhesives, foams, and pharmaceuticals, as well as fuels. For this biomaterial future to be realized, it needs to be grown: sustainably. Lignin has additionally been found to be a biostimulant that has the capacity to repair the nitrogen cycle and can be used as an organic pesticide, soil improver, and plant growth regulator. Thus the production of lignin itself produces a positive feedback loop for regenerative agriculture.

The Tennessee Region Biomass Initiative (TRBI) is established in 2031 to coordinate and equitably manage the biomaterial transition. It is enabled through the Net-Zero America Act and the Farming Cooperatives Act, among others, that are legislated following the Sixth Deadly American Heat Wave of 2029. TRBI assembles workers, rural landowners, industry leaders, business owners, and educational and financial institutions into a corporation of cooperatives that is worker- owned and democratically governed. Operating across the sectors of agriculture, industry, finance, retail, knowledge, and ecosystems, the TRBI catalyzes a network of previously existing systems and institutions, bridging production, upcycling, emerging technologies, education, training, and stewardship. The consortium transforms the region’s monocrop agriculture to regenerative agroforestry that cultivates the resources for the biomaterial economy while accelerating food production and improving the health and biodiversity of farm and forest lands.

Lands: A wholesale transition away from carbon-intensive petroleum and fossil fuel dependency toward a biomaterial economy implicates a transition in land use: especially for farm and forest lands. Tennessee’s farmlands, consisting of primarily independently owned or family run farms, see crops devastated by the annual climate disruptions. Small- and medium-scale farmers join the TRBI cooperatives as they offer shared self-governance, shared infrastructures and knowledge, economies of scale, and more diversified yields from their lands. The region’s lands begin to be converted to agroforestry, sustainable silvopasture, and regenerative farming practices such as intercropping. These are adopted to care for the long-term health of the land and its species, while also producing needed biomatter for high volume lignin and biomaterial production.

Agroforestry: Sustainable silvopasture and regenerative farming practices such as intercropping are adopted. Intercropping, a technique known since indigenous farming, is an interspecies endeavor which combines forestry with grazing and/or intermixes of different plant crops. High yield lignin crops such as switchgrass, loblolly pine, oak, and walnut are intercropped with feed plantings for free range livestock such as chickens, pigs, sheep, and cows, generating hybrid farmscapes. These farm typologies convert existing monocrop lands. Labor practices of animal husbandry, care, maintenance, and large scale composting are implemented and adaptievly managed relative to carbon sequestration, yield optimization, and soil health in these co-evolving regenerative landscapes. Infrastructures: The bioeconomy and agroforestry transition is enabled by new physical infrastructures. These include new Biomaterial Storage Silos, Regional Seed Banks, Communal Seed Libraries, Monitoring Towers, Cooperative Farm Housing, and Biorefineries. Located strategically throughout the region, they connect the network, reduce transportation impacts, and increase resilience. Their architecture is an extension of the new material economy, deploying both its biomaterial composites and construction logics such as mass timber construction and self-shading lignin composite building skins. Most infrastructures couple as educational, training, and demonstration sites, attracting cooperative members, farmers, researchers, and students, both regionally and internationally.

Biorefinery: The TRBI constructs the first Lignin Biorefinery on a brownfield site near the Nickajack Dam in Marion County, TN. It is a model for a new industrial architecture designed as a river companion infrastructure. The Biorefinery is a multifunctional and physically distributed facility whose mass timber bars span constructed rock berms. It coexists with the landscape, mediating flood impacts through constructed wetlands that utilize nature-based processes to remediate wastewater before returning it to the river. The adjacent TRBI Demonstration Farm is where regenerative farming typologies being implemented throughout the region undergo testing, are refined for ecosystem health, and facilitate regional educational programs and agritourism. This new kind of hybrid bioindustrial site is not cut off from everyday life but rather integrated with it. From the river, one can see people engaged in a combination of labor, maintenance, and recreational activities: a team collecting floodplain soil samples, an operator maintaining an open hopper barge, and a grandparent floating in a pink, bioplastic flamingo.